escaping HTML tags in page title

I'm looking for a way to allow escaped HTML tags in the page title. It's no problem to use $Title.XML in the template to escape the tags properly, but if I have a title like "<p> The Paragraph Tag" it confuses the site tree in the CMS. How can I escape HTML titles in the CMS site tree?

I can enter "&lt;p&gt; The Paragraph Tag" into the navigation label field and it works - but it's always nice to have escapes done automatically. And this could also be a possible error source if a client uses a page title with a '<' or '>' character.